Funeral industry trends, technology and tips

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Funeral Innovations today introduced the Email Copilot, the funeral industry’s first turn-key email solution. With more than 90% of the adult population in the US having an active email address, funeral homes and cemeteries are looking to take their marketing message and branding to the inboxes of their community. Many owners see the need to expand their marketing to email, but most have avoided it due to the time required to create the content.

The Email Copilot provides a turn-key solution where you can create professional email newsletters in less than 5 minutes. Unlike other email platforms available, the Email Copilot includes a large library of industry specific stories. With a simple click, you can take a selected story and customize it with your own wording and graphics to create a beautiful, personalized newsletter.

“We are very excited about the potential of the Email Copilot. Email is an established technology that has proven results in terms of marketing effectiveness. Our Email Copilot solves the challenges of creating an effective monthly newsletter, without breaking the bank. Best of all, firms using the Email Copilot to send newsletters are seeing email open rates up to 200% higher than industry average!”, says Greg Young, Co-founder of Funeral Innovations.

To compliment the original stories, there are several features of the Email Copilot that help collect newsletter subscribers through your website and Facebook page. All the emails collected are verified, ensuring your email list is valid to avoid spam reports.

If you have a Facebook Page for your funeral home or cemetery (and if you don’t, contact us asap!), you probably have watched as your fan count slowly rises (or if you’re using our Social Media Copilot, your fan count has quickly risen!). You’ve been adding content and you’re delighting in everyone who likes, shares or comments on it. You think you’ve got a good handle on things, right?

Well, maybe not! Do you know if you’re reaching the right people?

The important thing to remember is not everyone on Facebook is your target market. If you’re a funeral home or cemetery, your primary market is most likely people 45 and older, and in particular, women. After all, they are the ones often making the buying decisions.

That doesn’t mean you should be ignoring younger demographics. There is a lot of value in reaching and engaging younger folks within your community on Facebook. Younger people are often more comfortable with social media and as a result generate more overall engagement. And even if these people aren’t your target market, their engagement also helps spread your content to their networks, including their parents and grandparents. Plus, more engagement overall makes Facebook naturally spread your content to more people. In addition, they are going to be your target market at some point in the future, right?

But if the majority of your reach and engagement is coming from younger people, you’re ultimately missing the big picture. You’re fooled into thinking you’re doing a great job with your Facebook marketing while in the end falling short of your business goals.

So how can you tell if your target market is engaging with your content?

It’s easy: head over to Facebook Insights, which shows all the data for your page. Here’s how:

If you’re the Admin of your Facebook Page, you’ll see a button at the top of your Page called Insights. Click that.

Next click on the People Tab

Then choose the Fans sub-tab.

From here, you’ll see the makeup of all your fans, based on age and gender, and how that compares to the overall demographics of Facebook as a whole. Here’s an example of one of our partners, who has a out-sized proportion of fans in their target market!

Next, click on the “People Engaged” sub-tab. From here you’ll see the makeup of the folks who actually engage with your content – in other words, the people who like, comment, click on or share the stuff you post.

When you look at the demographic buckets, you’d like to see at least 50% of your engagement coming from your target market: people 45 and up. To determine your total percent, just add up the percents of all the bar chart starting at 45-54 and going to the right. In this sample, from one of our partners, you’ll see that 68% of their total engagement comes from people 45 and up. That’s a great result, and shows they are reaching and engaging their target market!

If you’re not reaching enough of your target market, what can you do to improve? One way is to run targeted Facebook ads, to ensure the right people are being exposed to your page and your content. You can do that yourself, or you can entrust an expert by using our Social Media Copilot. We have extensive experience and proven success in boosting your reach and engagement of those people who are in your target market, helping you meet your marketing and business goals!

To stress the importance of engaging your target market, we’ve also added a new metric to our Facebook Power Rankings that measures your Demographics for you. Head over to our free Power Rankings to see how your demographic reach compares to other Facebook Pages in our industry.

Most importantly, as part of our Social Media Copilot solution, we have developed a proven strategy for helping funeral homes and cemeteries succeed on Facebook. No more guessing or hoping for success: we can guarantee it! Contact us today to learn more or to get started now.

All Premium Social Media Copilot subscribers already have access to the Poems content feed: you’ll see if on the left-hand side of your Copilot. Just click through to view all the poems and images. There’s no further action necessary: the poems will be included in your schedule automatically by the Copilot. Easy, huh?

If you’re not yet a Copilot subscriber, or are on the Basic plan, just upgrade to Premium now to get the Poems feed. Of course, you’ll also get a lot more when you go Premium, including growth ads, boosted posts, Holiday and Special Days campaigns, more frequent posting, Boomerang, Reach Prediction and the rest of the Post Genius premium features!

You probably already know the Social Media Copilot is the best way for funeral homes and cemeteries to grow their Facebook presence. Now we’re excited to announce the Social Media Copilot just got a whole lot better!

Introducing the new Social Media Copilot

The next time you log in to the Copilot, you’ll immediately notice something new. The Copilot is now bigger and better in so many ways! Check out just a few of them:

Brand New Look

The Copilot received a massive facelift, improving the design and navigation, while making it easier to manage your content.

Mobile friendly

The new Copilot works great on mobile, allowing you to manage your schedule of posts from anywhere your phone is… meaning everywhere!

Campaigns

For Premium subscribers, we’re rolling out “Campaigns”, featuring time-sensitive series of posts that are scheduled for specific dates, like Holidays, Special Days, and the currently running Breast Cancer Awareness campaign. In addition, you can now click “Schedule All” to schedule every post in the campaign with a single click!

Predicted Reach

As the newest feature within the Post Genius package (exclusive for Premium subscribers), Predicted Reach shows you how many people you can expect will see each post… before you even publish it!! The predictions are accurate to within 10%, and getting smarter all the time. Amazing, huh?

Much More

We can’t fit all the improvements in this email (you’re probably busy with work, after all), but go ahead and login to http://funeralinnovations.com and see for yourself all the ways the Copilot just got better than ever!

2013 was by far our best year yet, as we’ve released many exciting new products, features and partnerships to help funeral homes grow online. We are deeply grateful to all the amazing funeral homes we work with in our effort to move the industry forward.

In case you missed anything, here are the highlights:

Social Media Copilot

The Social Media Copilot was the hit of 2013! The Copilot makes it easy for funeral homes to engage and grow their fan bases. In fact, Facebook posts published by the Copilot reached over 1 MILLION people in your communities in 2013!

The Copilot content library now consists of almost 2,000 posts, hand-picked to engage your funeral home’s audience. In addition, we released a handful of new content feeds including a “Special Days” feed, pet loss feeds, and “Branded Photo Boards”, which automatically customizes grief-related photo boards with your funeral home’s logo for the ultimate viral branding on Facebook.

Through the launch of our new Copilot Captain program, we’ve helped funeral homes increase their fan count in their communities by over 50%!

Finally, we launched Copilot Insights to help show you exactly how many people are seeing your posts on Facebook, and which are the most popular, without ever leaving your email inbox!

Talk of a Lifetime on Facebook

We are excited to have partnered with the Funeral and Memorial Information Council (FAMIC) to help you share the Talk of a Lifetime campaign with your funeral home’s Facebook fans!

As part of our partnership with FAMIC, we released a free version of our Social Media Copilot that automatically publishes the Talk of a Lifetime content to your funeral home’s Facebook Page.

Want to try the free Talk of a Lifetime version of the Copilot? There’s absolutely no cost and you can cancel at any time.

Healing Registry

Our Healing Registry e-commerce solution got even better in 2013, with a mobile version to make it easy and accessible on even the small screens of smart phones.

For the year, our partners have seen a $63 average CPM through our Healing Registry. In other words, every 1,000 obituary visits has resulted in $63 of flower and gift sales!

To put this in context, our Healing Registry gets over 50% higher CPM than what we’ve observed with other obituary e-commerce solutions!

Funeral Innovations is Growing!

We were excited to welcome a new member to the Funeral Innovations team this year. James Arama joined Funeral Innovations as a software developer, and he brings an unmatched work ethic, curiosity and creativity to the funeral industry. James is set to graduate from Marist College in New York, with a major in Computer Science, and experience working at Intel as well as a high school national championship programming pedigree!

Looking Forward to 2014

As great as 2013 was, we can’t wait to show you all awesome things already in the works for 2014!

We’d love to partner with you in our mission of helping funeral homes grow their businesses online. If growing your company sounds good to you, contact us and see how we can help!

We’re excited to announce that our Healing Registry has gone mobile! Now people who visit obituaries on your mobile website can purchase sympathy flowers and gifts right from their phone, resulting a better customer experience and more revenue for your funeral home.

If you use the Funeral Innovations Healing Registry, your mobile registry is already enabled.

Our Social Media Copilot has been helping funeral homes take their Facebook presence to the next level, by helping manage their Facebook posting and content. It’s been so effective that its posts have reached well over 100,000 people on Facebook in the past month!

Now funeral homes that use the Social Media Copilot will know exactly how many people the Copilot is helping them reach! We’re excited to launch our new Copilot Insights, weekly emails that detail your Facebook Page’s performance and reach!

Copilot Insights emails show a wealth of information about your Facebook Page, laid out in a way that is simple to understand. Each week, the emails show you:

How many different people saw your content

How many new fans your Facebook Page gained during the week

How many people saw and interacted with each of your posts that week

With the Social Media Copilot Insights, we’re excited to continue helping our partners grow their fan base, increase their reach within their community, and understand how it all works!

Many of our partners (“The Innovators”) are surprised to find out just how many visitors are going to their online obituaries. That’s understandable, because our web growth platform has a lot of tricks to help drive traffic to their website!

However, we wanted to make it easier to know when your obituaries are seeing lots of visits. We are excited to release our latest feature, which notifies you daily via email when you have high traffic obituaries, and shows where all those visitors are coming from!

Just another way to demonstrate the value of the best web platform in the business!

If you attended our live ICCFA webinar earlier this week for learning how to take your pet loss business to the next level with Facebook, you learned some secrets about how Facebook works and how you can use that knowledge to gain a step up.

If you want the full slide deck from the presentation, you’ll find it all here!